Judicial Sanctions Research Articles

Did It Work? Examining the Impact of an Alcohol Intervention on Sanctioned College Students

Universities often conduct alcohol interventions for individuals who have violated institutional, local, or state laws. Few of these programs have been evaluated thoroughly. This study examined the impact of a 10-hour alcohol education course on 400 college students whose attendance was required as part of a judicial sanction. The quasi-experimental study design had participants completing a pretest and posttest with a follow-up survey 3 months after completion of the program. Instruments designed for this study were used to examine alcohol use, perceived effects of alcohol use, risk of alcoholism, and negative consequences associated with use. Pre–post comparisons showed decreased quantity–frequency of alcohol use, reduced negative consequences, and increased perceived risk. However, only increased perceived risk continued 3 months after the intervention. Implications for practice are provided.

The demand for judicial sanctions: voter information and the election of judges

We examine 20 partisan judicial elections over an 8-year period to determine whether judge specific information shows in election results. We find demand for judicial sanctions looks much like other voting processes. Among voters, Democratic incumbent judges, who tend to be lenient, are rewarded for being harsh, while Republican incumbent judges, who generally are harsh, are rewarded for being lenient. Voters are not found to be a random sample of the population, and we find that straight ticket votes obscure information from selective voters.

Mandating Interlocks for Fully Revoked Offenders: The New Mexico Experience

Objective. In New Mexico, between July 1999 and December 2002, the installation of an ignition interlock was an optional judicial sanction for second and third driving-while-impaired (DWI) offenders. This is a study of the recidivism of 437 offenders who were convicted and installed interlocks for an average of 322 days during that period. Methods. The comparison group was a stratified random sample (N = 12,554) of the 20,949 offenders who were convicted during the same period but did not install interlocks. DWI arrest and conviction data for all study participants were received from the Motor Vehicle Department's Citation Tracking System. Results. Only 11 (2.5%) of the interlock offender group were rearrested for DWI while interlocks were installed, whereas 1,017 (8.1%) of the comparison group were rearrested during an equivalent 322-day period. Survival graphs and Cox proportional hazard regression analyses were used to compare the interlock and noninterlock groups during installation, after installation, and for the entire period up to December 2004. Results indicate a reduction in recidivism of 65% during installation. After removal, there was no significant difference in recidivism rates in a 3-year follow-up period. Following all offenders for 4 years, including both the period while the interlock was installed and the period after its removal, indicates that the difference in recidivism achieved during installation, though not increased, is maintained, so at the end of 4 years, interlock users still have lower total recidivism than nonusers. Conclusions. The magnitude of interlock effectiveness reported here is similar to those in other published studies with comparable samples.

Do Protective Behavioral Strategies Mediate the Relationship Between Drinking Motives and Alcohol Use in College Students?

Heavy alcohol use among college students represents a public health problem on American college campuses. Use of protective behavioral strategies (PBS) has been shown to be related to reduced alcohol use and fewer alcohol-related problems, but the relationship of PBS to other alcohol-related constructs is unclear. The purpose of this study was to determine whether the use of PBS mediated the relationship between positively and negatively reinforcing drinking motives and both alcohol use and alcohol-related problems. Data were collected on 254 undergraduate students at a large, public university in the northeast region of the United States. Approximately one third (n = 90) of the participants were volunteers, whereas the remaining individuals enrolled in the study as an option for satisfying an alcohol-related campus judicial sanction. Structural equation modeling analyses indicated that use of PBS partially mediated the relationships between positively reinforcing (i.e., social and enhancement) drinking motives and both alcohol use and alcohol-related problems. Use of PBS did not mediate the relationship between negatively reinforcing (i.e., coping) drinking motives and alcohol use or alcohol-related problems. The theoretical models accounted for 26% of the variance in alcohol use and 24% of the variance in alcohol-related problems. This study suggests that PBS should be incorporated into theoretical models devoted to understanding college student drinking.

Court Diversion in Perspective

Court diversion schemes have been running for a decade in New Zealand and are increasing in number in Australia. This paper aims to give an international and historical context to these developments, by reference to psychiatric initiatives at courts in the US and in England and Wales. From a review of the specialist literature, an account is given of three forms of psychiatric intervention in courts over the last 90 years: court psychiatric clinics and mental health courts in the US, and court diversion schemes in England and Wales. High levels of psychiatric morbidity among prisoners, coupled with a continuing increase in prisoner numbers, demonstrate the need for systems for dealing with mentally ill people who come before the courts. Court diversion in England and Wales developed as part of a system where the mentally ill who are found guilty are sent to hospital in lieu of any other sentence. Its focus is on a form of psychiatric triage, and its ethos is the health of the patient. Court psychiatric clinics in the US grew up as an alternative to assessment in prison. Their focus has been on full psychiatric evaluation in an insanity and incompetence jurisdiction. The ethos has been that of serving the court. Mental health courts are heavily influenced by ideas of therapeutic jurisprudence, and their emphasis has been on a judge holding minor offenders in community care through the threat of judicial sanction. Experience in England and Wales has shown that court diversion can be a powerful and effective intervention. In order for it to function properly, those running court schemes need direct admission rights to psychiatric beds, both open and locked. Court diversion schemes are best as part of a spectrum of services to police stations, courts and prisons, which involved both general and forensic psychiatrists.

What Do Social Workers Need to Know About Mental Health Courts?

Mental health courts are an emerging strategy to engage mentally ill offenders in treatment and to avoid unnecessary incarceration. These courts began in 1997 based upon the drug court model; there are currently over 70 courts nationwide. These courts are heterogeneous in structure, work with interdisciplinary teams, and seek to engage the consumer in treatment rather than use judicial sanctions. Social workers are integral members of these teams; yet, no research has been published in social work journals on mental health courts. This article explains the background and context of the courts, describes their features, discusses what social workers need to know about mental health courts, and concludes with ideas for how social workers may work effectively with mental health courts.

When 2 or 3 Come Together

This article investigates policies that are responsive to crime in disadvantaged, urban neighborhoods from a community-based context. The vehicle is an analysis of a community-wide prayer vigil held in in May of 1997. The vigil resulted from a collaboration between the Police Department and hundreds of (mostly) African-American churches on Chicago's West Side. Strikingly, the local police district's commander facilitated the vigil. We explain the sociological and political significance of this collaboration by drawing upon the Chicago School of urban sociology and demonstrating theoretically and empirically the potential for the collaboration, through the integration of key community institutions, to promote community capacity to resist crime and to complete other goals and projects of residents. The article's end addresses constitutional questions. If collaboration between churches and the police through religious activity enhances the community efficacy of poor minority neighborhoods, is there any way to reconcile the benefits of such activity with constitutional concerns about religious establishment? We focus on the extent to which African Americans have been able to influence this jurisprudence through litigation rather than the internal structure of Establishment Clause jurisprudence. A review of the litigation reveals the particular nature of the involvement of African Americans in the development of Establishment Clause jurisprudence, and it demonstrates plainly the extent to which judicial sanction of church-state interaction has had, and continues to have, important racial consequences. African Americans, through representative litigating institutions, have consistently recognized the disparate impact of church-state partnerships, but the Court has never acknowledged the non-religious implications of its Establishment Clause decisions. As a result, Establishment Clause jurisprudence is disconnected from the realities of disparate impact, and that is potentially problematic for African-American communities. We believe excavation of the realities of disparate impact is critical in assessing the extent to which modern church state partnerships should be allowed or even blessed by the state.

Les notions d'autorisation et de consentement dans le contrat médical

While the terms « authorization » and « consent » are commonly used in juridical language, their definition end precise meaning are not acknowledged by the Quebec legislator. In fact the two terms are often used interchangeably. Both the legislative history of the first paragraph of article 20 of the Civil Code, an article which provides protective measures for the discerning minor entering into a medical contract, and the reforms suggested by the Civil Code Revision Office, demonstrate this confusion as to the proper juridical terms and as to the role of the parental and judicial sanction. The author maintains that the term « consent » is not applicable to the juridical role of the parent of judge.

Financial Penalties: Who Pays, Who Doesn't and Why Not?

Abstract: Against the background of a new emphasis by government on the use and enforcement of financial penalties, this article explores some of the realities and problems that currently associate with this form of judicial and administrative sanction, and highlights some of the operational and practice challenges to be addressed if, indeed, financial penalties are to play a more significant role in the future. The article does this, in particular, by drawing on research conducted for the Home Office from 2000 to 2002 and based in the magistrates' courts of England and Wales. This study provides an analysis of the non‐payment or default problem and specifically focuses on the lessons to be learned about the suitability of financial penalties for different circumstances.

Informal Institutions and the Rule of Law: The Judicial Response to State Killings in Buenos Aires and Sao Paulo in the 1990s

While its very persistence in the face of multifaceted crises is no small achievement, Latin American democracy in the last two decades has been criticized as incomplete, unconsolidated, and lacking in the rule of law.1 The region's legal systems have played a large part in this disillusionment for condoning corruption, favoritism, and the continuation of repression. O'Donnell captures this failure of universalistic democratic citizenship with his metaphor of areas.2 One aspect of these brown areas is the inability, to different degrees, of the justice systems in Brazil and Argentina to protect certain basic rights, as evidenced by the failure of their courts to punish the large number of police homicides that continue to be committed. The problem is serious. In 1992 alone the Sao Paulo police killed more people than the last military dictatorship did in the entire country in all its years of rule.3 Yet a policeman who kills someone in the course of routine policing in Sao Paulo has a 94 percent chance of escaping judicial sanction. Moreover, the complete answer may not be found in improving the organizational capacities of judicial institutions. Tens of millions of dollars have been spent on judicial reform programs to address the perceived weakness of judiciaries all over Latin America. Yet the consensus is that the monies spent on judicial reform have not led to a significant improvement in judicial services, and rights violations continue despite the proliferation of legal norms that purport to outlaw them.4 This paradox is made evident in the judicial response to state killings in So Paulo and Buenos Aires: while neither of the two legal systems is very effective, the apparently stronger institutions in the former coexist with a higher degree of impunity for rights violators. One of the arguments that have been proposed to explain democratic deficiencies in Latin America is that informal institutions contradict formal democratic ones.5 But despite valuable insights, insufficient attention has been paid both to the definition of informal institutions and to empirical analyses of their effect. This article offers a precise definition of informal institutions and evaluates one informal institution in an area vital to democracy, the enforcement of civil rights, and its effect on the judiciaries in Sao Paulo and Buenos Aires. The data are drawn from a sample of cases taken from the courts of So Paulo and Buenos Aires involving police homi

Innovative Alcohol Education Program for College and University Judicial Sanctions

Violations of alcohol policies constitute most of the judicial referrals on college campuses. Many counseling centers provide alcohol education as the primary sanction for these violations. These classes are often ineffective. This article presents a new alcohol education model that uses group counseling with peer counselors.

Stalker Classification Aids Diagnosis, Treatment

Back to table of contents Previous article Next article Professional NewsFull AccessStalker Classification Aids Diagnosis, TreatmentChristine LehmannChristine LehmannSearch for more papers by this authorPublished Online:15 Jun 2001https://doi.org/10.1176/pn.36.12.0008aStalkers can be young or old, male or female, professional or unemployed. But most are male, isolated, socially inept, and mentally ill, said Australian stalking expert Paul Mullen, M.D., at APA’s 2001 annual meeting in New Orleans in May.He and two colleagues at the Victorian Institute of Forensic Mental Health received the Manfred S. Guttmacher Award last month for their book Stalkers and their Victims (Original article: see article above).“Most of them are looking for some semblance of a relationship in a life devoid of intimacy,” said Mullen.Mullen found from his study of 145 stalkers, which was reported in the August 1999 American Journal of Psychiatry, that half the stalkers never had a long-term relationship, and 30 percent were separated or divorced.To facilitate diagnosis and treatment, he classified stalkers into five categories: the rejected, the intimacy seeker, the incompetent suitor, the resentful, and the predatory.“People rejected by their spouses or lovers tend to vacillate between seeking reconciliation and revenge. What sustains them is narcissistic entitlement and the belief this is the only relationship they are going to have, which they may be right about,” said Mullen.Forty-three of the 52 “rejected” stalkers had personality disorders, said Mullen.The intimacy-seeking type wants to establish a relationship with his “true love” regardless of her wishes. “Several of these stalkers were prone to jealousy, and a number became enraged at their would-be partner’s indifference to their approaches,” said Mullen.Twenty-seven of the 49 intimacy seekers were delusional in believing that their love was reciprocated. Fifteen had a personality disorder and a delusion that their quest would be ultimately successful. The remaining five had schizophrenia, and two had mania, said Mullen.The incompetent suitors were exclusively men who were rebuffed when they asked women for a date. “They tend to be socially inept. When they are rejected, they begin to stalk due to irritation, arrogance, and optimism that their behavior will change the woman’s mind,” said Mullen.These men were often intellectually limited, with primitive courting skills.The resentful stalkers believe they have been humiliated or treated unfairly and pursue stalking to express their distress or anger, said Mullen. In his study, half of the 16 resentful stalkers pursued a vendetta against a specific victim, while the remainder had a general grievance and chose their victims at random.“They are sustained by an enormous sense of power and control over the victim. The resentful stalkers are hard to treat because they often believe they are the victims,” said Mullen.The six predatory stalkers in Mullen’s study were preparing to attack sexually a victim whom they chose at random. They took pleasure in gathering information about the victim and fantasizing about the assault, which could prolong the stalking. They tended to have paraphilias and prior sex convictions, according to Mullen.Mullen emphasized that the focus of therapy should be on factors that sustain the stalking such as the stalker’s narcissistic sense of entitlement.He also recommended confronting the self-deceptions, which deny, minimize, or justify the behavior. “You have to spend a lot of time establishing that the perpetrator is a stalker,” he said.Treating the rejected stalker should involve helping him or her give up the relationship and accept loss.Judicial sanctions do not work well with intimacy seekers, who tend to believe they must pay a price for true love, said Mullen. The court may order treatment, which should focus on treating their delusions or other mental disorders.“Try to help them overcome their social isolation, but don’t be too ambitious. Get them a cat—a dog is a major improvement,” advised Mullen.The incompetent suitors are responsive to judicial sanctions but tend to relapse, said Mullen. The treatment goal is to improve their courting skills and general social skills.The resentful stalkers are the most challenging to treat. “Forget instilling victim empathy—they know precisely what they’re doing. They rarely get arrested because they play a careful game of maximizing the distress to the victim and minimizing the damage to themselves,” said Mullen.Recognize the legitimacy of the basic grievance where possible but label the excesses of their pursuit, recommended Mullen. He also recommended that predatory stalkers should be treated as sex offenders. ▪ ISSUES NewArchived

Second Generation Employment Discrimination: A Structural Approach

This article explores current and emerging regulatory approaches to manifestations of workplace bias. Second generation bias involves structures and patterns of interaction within the workplace that, over time, exclude members of non-dominant groups. This complex and dynamic type of problems poses a serious challenge for a first generation system that depends on judicial or legislative elaboration of rules, enforced by judicial sanctions for deliberate violations. Over the last decade, an interesting and complex regulatory pattern has emerged to address second generation bias. Multiple public, private and nongovernmental actors are actively and interactively developing systems to address issues such as sexual harassment and the glass ceiling. Each of these institutional actors has begun to approach these questions as posing essentially issues of problem solving. Each has, to varying degrees, linked their anti-bias efforts with the more general challenge of enhancing institutional capacity to manage complex workplace relationships. These multiple actors have, perhaps unwittingly, begun to carve out distinctive roles and relationships that form the outlines of a dynamic regulatory system for addressing second generation discrimination. This article offers a framework that makes visible these emerging and converging patterns for addressing second generation discrimination problems in the judiciary, the workplace, and mediating institutions. It explores the potential for a judicially de-centered, holistic, and dynamic approach. This new regulatory approach shifts the emphasis away from primary reliance on after-the-fact enforcement of specific legal rules. Instead, normative elaboration occurs through a fluid, interactive relationship between problem solving within specific workplaces and the courts, mediated by non-governmental actors. In this framework, compliance is defined, achieved through, and evaluated in relation to improving institutional capacity to identify, prevent, and redress exclusion, bias, and abuse. The article documents examples of this structural approach in the workplace, the courts, and the non-governmental sector, and then extrapolates from these examples to offer a starting point for identifying how internal workplace processes can meet concerns about accountability, legitimacy and effectiveness. In particular, it provides case studies of Home Depot, Intel, and Deloitte & Touche, and analyzes how these initiatives achieve accountability and effective remediation of second generation problems. It also addresses the counter-tendencies and patterns that undercut the viability of this structural approach, and proposes some preliminary steps that encourage the information pooling, capacity building, and accountability mechanisms needed to more fully realize the potential inchoate in the Supreme Court's structural jurisprudence. These proposals highlight the importance of professional and institutional gatekeepers, such as insurance companies, research consortia, human resource practitioners, advocacy organizations, and lawyers, in performing these crucial roles within the emerging regulatory system.

Privacy, Publication, and the First Amendment: The Dangers of First Amendment Exceptionalism

The coordination of common law and constitutional norms are of pressing importance on matters offreedom of speech. In the Supreme Court and elsewhere, it is possible to discern two sharply inconsistent attitudes toward this question. One view holds that the First Amendment simply prevents any legislative backsliding from the common law rules that protect freedom of speech and of the press, much as they protect freedom of contract and freedom of action generally. On this view, the standard rule governing damages and injunctive relief apply to speech much as they do anywhere else. On the alternative view of what is termed First Amendment exceptionalism, the First Amendment protection is read more broadly to afford speech greater protection than the common law rules that insulate the publication of stolen information from judicial sanction by either damages or injunction. The article then argues that the common law approach affords a better balance between privacy and disclosure with respect to a wide range of confidential information, including the protection of trade secrets. In so doing, it criticizes the results reached in a number of important recent cases including Desnick v. American Broadcasting Co., Food Lion v. Capital Cities/ABC, and Ford Motor Co. v. Lane.

Beyond Judicial Sanctions: The Negative Impact of Conviction for Environmental Offences

This article examines the extent to which the criminal sanctioning mechanism of prosecution can be relied upon to provide a sufficient deterrent in environmental regulation. The implications of criminal law enforcement of pollution controls currently extend beyond the immediate financial burden of payment of fines and legal costs. Some of the dimensions of the adverse publicity attracted by enforcement action against non-compliant operators will be assessed (such as unfavourable entries on pollution control registers and loss of patronage) in order to determine whether they live up to the need for a real and substantial deterrent. Arguably, these publicity-based aspects of deterrence lack reliability: they operate only in exceptional cases and their impact is often sporadic. While the solution to inadequate deterrents is often thought to lie in increased levels of prosecution, this article highlights the disadvantages of such an approach and explores the Agency's more sophisticated practice of strategic litigation.

Equal Opportunity Law and the Construction of Internal Labor Markets

Internal labor markets have been explained with efficiency and control arguments; however, retrospective event-history data from 279 organizations suggest that federal Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) law was the force behind the spread of formal promotion mechanisms after 1964. The findings highlight the way in which American public policy, with its broad outcome-oriented guidelines for organizations, stimulates managers to experiment with compliance mechanisms with and eye to judicial sanction. In response to EEO legislation and case law, personnel managers devised and diffused employment practices that treat all classes of workers as ambitious and achievement oriented in the process of formalizing and rationalizing promotion decisions.

The Prison Experience: Disciplinary Institutions and Their Inmates in Early Modern Europe

The prison occupies a central position in the penal systems of most countries today. Many historians believe that imprisonment did not become a major judicial sanction until the nineteenth century. Pieter Spierenburg corrects this view. First as a disciplinary institution and later as a penal option, the prison has played an important role in European societies from the late sixteenth century to today. Spierenburg traces the evolution of the prison during the early modern period, with particular emphasis on the prisons of the Netherlands, Germany, and France, but with reference to all of Europe. Spierenburg looks at the daily lives of inmates, a focus that is unusual in historical studies of prisons. He also analyzes the long term nature of change in prisons and the conceptions of prisoners as persons who had broken away from family bonds. His work adds to our understanding of social change and daily life in early modern Europe and will appeal to historians, sociologists, and criminologists.

The effectiveness of deferred prosecution for driving while intoxicated.

Offenders of driving while intoxicated (DWI) who received deferred prosecution and concomitant alcoholism treatment had significantly more postdeferral alcohol-related traffic violations than did a control group of DWI offenders who received normal judicial sanctions.

Government Financing of National Elections in France

In France the public financing of national election campaigns as practiced throughout its history has not yet resolved several problems which are related to the legal and political development of French institutions and society. This current legal situation, which is still in a state of transition, has been based on a series of conceptions which do not reflect the reality of modern political campaigns. So far, the French legislation seems to ignore the tremendous importance of contemporary advertising as a means of favoring candidates who can afford it and provides that only a limited number of activities, printed materials, and a limited amount of media time be given for free by the government in order to make a person's abilities and platform known. The Government of the Fifth Republic, instead of increasing its support to financial campaigns, has generally acted in such a way as if some limitations on necessary expenses would put all the candidates on the same level. Another problem consists of the deliberate ignoring of the existence of the parties in the legal sense, with the exception of broadcast regulations which do mention the parties and political groups by name. The dichotomy between the legislation and reality is so great that very often when the rules are violated, no judicial sanctions are imposed.

Must a Man Be His Cousin's Keeper?

ing to compel one person to donate a portion of his body to Yet recent events in Pittsburgh raised just that question. Robert McFall, a thirty-nine-yearold, unmarried asbestos worker, suffering from a usually fatal aplastic anemia, filed a suit in Judge Flaherty's court seeking an injunction to compel David Shimp, his unwilling cousin, to undergo a bone marrow transplant that doctors claimed was necessary to save McFall's life. The average citizen is probably also not aware of the strange things that periodically happen in American trial courts. A year ago, Judge Flaherty had sustained the right of a competent woman, a Jehovah's Witness, to refuse a blood transfusion, only to have his decision overturned by another judge who would not allow the woman to die. Three years earlier, another Pittsburgh judge allowed a surgeon to amputate the gangrenous leg of an unconscious sixty-seven-year-old man, who had previously made his daughter promise that she would never approve of an amputation. The judge labeled his decision more of a human decision than a judicial one. Before McFall's suit, there had never been a case in this country (or possibly anywhere in the world) seeking to extract bodily tissue from an objecting donor. There had been a scattering of transplant cases, including some bone marrow transplantation, where the potential donor was either mentally incompetent and unable either to consent or object, or a child who was willing to make the donation but because of legal minority required judicial sanction to do so. In one such case, a kidney was sought from a mentally retarded man because another relative had refused to donate his. There is no mention in that case of compelling a donation from that relative, a forty-three-year-old farmer with nine children who refused on the grounds that his first duty was to his family. In another case, one involving bone marrow transplantation, a thirteen-year-old mentally retarded boy (and the only compatible donor) was selected to be the donor following a court hearing. The parents of the children (the donor and recipient were siblings) refused to consider the possibility of a third normal sibling, an only daughter, becoming the donor. Yet here it was-the unthinkable being sought and brought to court. Some would say that McFall never had any real chance because the law is so well settled. As Judge Flaherty stated in his opinion denying the transplant request, Our society, contrary to many others, has as its first principle, the respect for the individual, and that soc ety and government exist to protect the individual from being invaded and hurt by another. Yet the vitality of our legal system lies in its continual potential for change, and knowing this, McFall's lawer was ineluctably tempted to break new ground, as indeed it was arguably his professional responsibility to do.